Approaches to the Study of Myth and Mythology

Etiologic Tales
Etiologic tales are very close to myth, and some scholars regard them as a
particular type of myth rather than as a separate category. In modern usage the
term etiology is used to refer to the description or assignment of causes (Greek
aitia). Accordingly, an etiologic tale explains the origin of a custom, state of
affairs, or natural feature in the human or divine world. Many tales explain the
origin of a particular rock or mountain.
Others explain iconographic features, such as the Hindu narrative ascribing the
blue neck of the god Siva to a poison he drank in primordial times. The
etiologic theme often seems to be added to a mythical narrative as an
afterthought. In other words, the etiology is not the distinctive characteristic of
myth.
Approaches to the Study of Myth and Mythology
The importance of studying myth to provide a key to a human society is a
matter of historical record. In the middle of the 19th century, for instance, a
newly appointed British governor of New Zealand, Sir George Grey, was
confronted by the problem of how to come to terms with the Maori, who were
hostile to the British. He learned their language, but that proved insufficient for
an understanding of the way in which they reasoned and argued. In order to be
able to conduct negotiations satisfactorily, he found it necessary to study the
Maori's mythology, to which they made frequent reference.
Other government officials and Christian missionaries of the 19th and 20th
centuries made similar efforts to understand the mythologies of nations or
tribes so as to facilitate communication. Such studies were more than a means
to an end, whether efficient administration or conversion; they amounted to the
discovery that myths present a model or charter for man's behavior and that the
world of myth provides guidance for crucial elements in human existence--war
and peace, life and death, truth and falsehood, good and evil. In addition to
such practically motivated attempts to understand myth, theorists and scholars
from many disciplines have interested themselves in the study of the subject.
A close study of myth has developed in the West, especially since the 18th
century. Much of its material has come from the study of the Greek and Roman
classics, from which it has also derived some of its methods of interpretation.
The growth of philosophy in ancient Greece furthered allegorical
interpretations of myth--i.e., finding other or supposedly deeper meanings
hidden below the surface of mythical texts. Such meanings were usually seen
as involving natural phenomena or human values. Related to this was a
tendency toward rationalism, especially when those who studied myths
employed false etymologies.
Rationalism in this context connotes the scrutiny of myths in such a way as to
make sense of the statements contained in them without taking literally their
references to gods, monsters, or the supernatural. Thus, the ancient writer
Palaiphatos interpreted the story of Europa (carried off to Crete on the back of a
handsome bull, which was actually Zeus in disguise) as that of a woman
abducted by a Cretan called Tauros, the Greek word for bull; and Skylla, the
bestial and cannibalistic creature who attacked Odysseus' ship according to
Homer's Odyssey, was by the same process of rationalizing interpreted as
simply the name of a pirate ship. Of special and long-lasting influence in the
history of the interpretation of myth was Euhemerism (named after Euhemerus,
a Greek writer who flourished about 300 BC), according to which certain gods
were originally great people venerated because of their benefactions to
mankind.
The early Church Fathers adopted an attitude of modified Euhemerism,
according to which classical mythology was to be explained in terms of mere
men who had been raised to superhuman, demonic status because of their
deeds. By this means, Christians were able to incorporate myths from the
culturally authoritative pagan past into a Christian framework while defusing
their religious significance--the gods became ordinary humans.
The Middle Ages did not develop new theoretical perspectives on myth, nor,
despite some elaborate works of historical and etymological erudition, did the
Renaissance. In both periods, interpretations in terms of allegory and
Euhemerism tended to predominate.
In early 18th-century Italy, Giambattista Vico, a thinker now considered the
forerunner of all writers on ethnology, or the study of culture in human
societies, built on traditional scholarship--especially in law and philosophy--to
make the first clear case for the role of man's creative imagination in the
formation of distinct myths at successive cultural stages.
His work, which was most notably expressed in his Scienza Nuova (1725; The
New Science of Giambattista Vico), had no influence in his own century.
Instead, the notion that pagan myths were distortions of the biblical revelation
(first expressed in the Renaissance) continued to find favor.
Nevertheless, Enlightenment philosophy, reports from voyages of discovery,
and missionary reports (especially the Jesuits' accounts of North American
Indians) contributed to scholarship and fostered greater objectivity. Bernhard
Le Bovier de Fontenelle, a French scholar, compared Greek and American
Indian myths and suggested that there was a universal human predisposition
toward mythology. In De l'origine des fables (1724; "On the Origin of Fables")
he attributed the absurdities (as he saw them) of myths to the fact that the
stories grew up among an earlier, more primitive human society.
About 1800 the Romantics' growing fascination with language, the postulation
of an Indo-European language family, the study of Sanskrit, and the growth of
comparative studies, especially in history and philology, were all part of a trend
that included the study of myth.
The relevance of Indo-European studies to an understanding of Greek and
Roman mythology was carried to an extreme in the work of Friedrich Max
Müller, a German Orientalist who moved to Britain and undertook important
research on comparative linguistics. In his view, expressed in such works as
Comparative Mythology (1856), the mythology of the original Indo-European
peoples had consisted of allegorical stories about the workings of nature, in
particular such features as the sky, the Sun, and the dawn.
In the course of time, though, these original meanings had been lost (through,
in Muller's notorious phrasing, a "disease of language"), so that the myths no
longer told in a "rationally intelligible" way of phenomena in the natural world
but instead appeared to describe the "irrational" activities of gods, heroes,
nymphs, and others. For instance, one Greek myth related the pursuit of the
nymph Daphne by the god Phoebus Apollo. Since--in Müller's interpretation of
the evidence of comparative linguistics--"Daphne" originally meant "dawn,"
and "Phoibos" meant "morning sun," the original story was rationally
intelligible as "the dawn is put to flight by the morning sun."
One of the problems with this view is, of course, that it fails to account for the
fact that the Greeks continued to tell this and similar stories long after their
supposed meanings had been forgotten; and they did so, moreover, in the
manifest belief that the stories referred, not to nature, but precisely to gods,
heroes, and other mythical beings.
Interest in myth was greatly stimulated in Germany by Friedrich von
Schelling's philosophy of mythology, which argued that myth was a form of
expression, characteristic of a particular stage in human development, through
which men imagine the Absolute (for Schelling an all-embracing unity in
which all differences are reconciled). Scholarly interest in myth has continued
into the 20th century. Many scholars have adopted a psychological approach
because of interest aroused by the theories of Sigmund Freud. Subsequently,
new approaches in sociology and anthropology have continued to encourage
the study of myth.
Allegorical
An example of an allegorical interpretation would be that given by an ancient
commentator for the Iliad, book 20, verse 67. Referring to an episode in which
the gods fight each other, the commentator cites critics who have explained the
hostilities between the gods allegorically as an opposition between elements--
dry against wet, hot against cold, light against heavy. Thus, the gods Apollo,
Helios, and Hephaestus represent fire, and the god Poseidon and the river
Scamander represent water. Similarly, the goddess Athena is interpreted as
wisdom/sense, the god Ares as the absence of that quality, the goddess
Aphrodite as desire, and the god Hermes as reason. An allegorical
interpretation of a myth could be said to posit a one-to-one correspondence
between mythical "clothing" and the ideas being so clothed. This approach
tends to limit the meaning of a myth, whereas that meaning may in reality be
multiple, operating on several levels.
Romantic
In the late 18th century artists and intellectuals came increasingly to emphasize
the role of the emotions in human life and, correspondingly, to play down the
importance of reason (which had been regarded as supremely important by
thinkers of the Enlightenment). Those involved in the new movement were
known as Romantics. The Romantic movement had profound implications for
the study of myth. Myths--both the stories from Greek and Roman antiquity
and contemporary folktales--were regarded by the Romantics as repositories of
experience far more vital and powerful than those obtainable from what was
felt to be the artificial art and poetry of the aristocratic civilization of
contemporary Europe.
This new attitude is illustrated in a work of the German critic and
philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder entitled "Auszug aus einem
Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker" (1773; "Extract from a
Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples"). Ossian is the
name of an Irish warrior-poet whose Gaelic songs were supposedly translated
and presented to the world by James Macpherson in the 1760s. Although
largely the work of Macpherson himself, these songs made a colossal impact
when they were published. Herder believed that the more "savage," that is, the
more "alive" and "freedom-loving" a people (ein Volk) was, the more alive and
free its songs would be. In opposition to the culture of the educated, Herder
exalted the Kultur des Volkes ("culture of the people").
In 1769 Herder abandoned his job as a schoolteacher and took a boat from
Riga, on the Baltic, to Nantes, on the Atlantic coast of France. In Journal
meiner Reise im Jahre 1769 (1769; Journal of My Travels in the Year 1769), a
description of the experience, he wrote:
"In everything [on board ship] there is experience to illuminate the
original era of the myths. Then [i.e., in antiquity] every man, ignorant of
nature, listened for signs and had to listen for them. Then, Jupiter's
lightning was terrifying--as indeed it is [i.e., now] on the Ocean. There
are a thousand new and more natural explanations of mythology if one
reads, say, Orpheus, Homer, Pindar on board ship."
In other words, for Herder ancient myths were the natural expressions of the
concerns that would have confronted the ancients; and those concerns were the
very ones that, according to Herder, still confronted the Volk--e.g., ordinary
sailors--in Herder's own day.
Comparative
Since the Romantic movement, all study of myth has been comparative,
although comparative attempts were made earlier. The prevalence of the
comparative approach has meant that since the 19th century even the most
specialized studies have made generalizations about more than one tradition or
at the very least have had to take comparative works by others into account.
Indeed, for there to be any philosophical inquiry into the nature and function of
myth at all, there must exist a body of data about myths across a range of
societies. Such data would not exist without a comparative approach.
Folkloric
The classic folklore approach is that of Wilhelm Mannhardt, a German scholar,
who attempted to collect data on the "lower mythology," which he considered
to be more or less homogeneous in ancient and popular peasant traditions and
basic to all formation of myth. Mannhardt saw sufficient analogies and
similarities between the ancient and modern data to permit use of the latter in
interpreting the former. Like Herder, he saw the source of mythology in the
traditions passed on among the Volk. He collected information not only about
popular stories but also about popular customs.
He interpreted ancient Greek rituals by relating them to customs of the
agricultural peoples of northern Europe, proposing this link in his book Antike
Wald- und Feldkulte (1877; "Ancient Wood and Field Cults"). Other people
who examined myth from the folklore standpoint included Sir James Frazer, the
British anthropologist, the brothers Grimm (Jacob, who influenced Mannhardt,
and Wilhelm), who are well-known for their collections of folklore, and Stith
Thompson, who is notable for his classification of folk literature, particularly
his massive Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1955). The Grimms shared
Herder's passion for the poetry and stories of the Volk. Their importance stems
in part from the academic diligence and meticulousness that they brought to the
recording and study of popular tradition. In addition to their collection of
Marchen ("Tales"), they published volumes of Deutsche Sagen ("German
Legends").
These were tales that purported to record actual events and that were ostensibly
set in a specific place and period, as opposed to the "once-upon-a-time-in-the-
forest" setting characteristic of the Märchen. Collecting and classifying
mythological themes have remained the principal activities of the folklore
approach.
Functionalist
One of the leading exponents of the functionalist approach to myth was the
French sociologist Marcel Mauss, who used the phrase "total social facts" in
reference to religious symbols and myths and their irreducibility in terms of
other functions. In his Essai sur le don (1925; The Gift), Mauss referred to a
system of gift giving to be found in traditional, preindustrial societies.
Observing that there was a mass of complex data on the subject, Mauss
continued: in these "early" societies, social phenomena are not discrete; each
phenomenon contains all the threads of which the social fabric is composed. In
these total social phenomena, as we propose to call them, all kinds of
institutions find simultaneous expression: religious, legal, moral, and economic.
In his introduction to the English edition Edward Evans-Pritchard commented
on that passage:
"Total" is the key word of the Essay. The exchanges of archaic societies
which he examines are total social movements or activities. They are at
the same time economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious,
mythological phenomena. Their meaning can therefore only be grasped
if they are viewed as a complexconcrete reality.
Functionalism is primarily associated with the anthropologists Bronislaw
Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, however. Both ask not what the origin
of any given social behavior may be but how it contributes to maintaining the
system of which it is a part. In this view, in all types of society, every aspect of
life--every custom, belief, or idea--makes its own special contribution to the
continued effective working of the whole society. Functionalism has had a wide
appeal to anthropologists in Britain and the United States, especially as an
interpretation of myth as integrated with other aspects of society and as
supporting existing social relationships.
Structuralist
Structuralist approaches to myth are based on the analogy of myth to language.
Just as a language is composed of significant oppositions (e.g., between
phonemes, the constituent sounds of the language), so myths are formed out of
significant oppositions between certain terms and categories.
Structuralist analysis aims at uncovering what it sees as the logic of myth. It is
argued that supposedly primitive thought is logically consistent but that the
terms of this logic are not those with which modern Western culture is familiar.
Instead they are terms related to items of the everyday world in which the
"primitive" culture exists. This logic is usually based on empirical categories
(e.g., raw/cooked, upstream/downstream, bush/village) or empirical objects
(e.g., buffalo, river, gold, eagle). Some structuralists, such as the French
anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, have emphasized the presence of the same
logical patterns in myths throughout the world.
In earlier anthropology, "primitive mentality" was characterized by the inability
to make distinctions, by a sense of "mystic participation" or identity between
man, his cosmos, and all other beings. Beginning with complex kinship systems
and later exploring other taxonomies, structuralists argue to the opposite
conclusion: the supposedly primitive man is, if anything, obsessed with the
making of distinctions; his taxonomies reveal a complexity and sophistication
that rival those of modern man.
Formalist
In contrast to the structuralists' search for the underlying structure of myths, the
20th-century Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp investigated folktales by
dividing the surface of their narratives into a number of basic elements. These
elements correspond to different types of action that, in Propp's analysis,
always occur in the same sequence. Examples of the types of action isolated by
Propp are "An interdiction is to the hero"; "The interdiction is violated"; "The
false hero or villain is exposed"; and "The hero is married and ascends the
throne."
An important development of Propp's approach was made in the late 20th
century by the German historian of religion Walter Burkert. Burkert detected
certain recurrent patterns in the actions described in Greek myths, and he
related these patterns (and their counterparts in Greek ritual) to basic biologic
or cultural "programs of action."
An example of this relation is given in Burkert's Structure and History in
Greek Mythology and Ritual (1979). Burkert shows how certain Greek myths
have a recurring pattern that he calls "the girl's tragedy." According to this
pattern, a girl first leaves home; after a period of seclusion, she is raped by a
god; there follows a time of tribulation, during which she is threatened by
parents or relatives; eventually, having given birth to a baby boy, the girl is
rescued, and the boy's glorious future is assured.
The reason for the frequency and persistence of this pattern is, in Burkert's
view, the fact that it reflects a basic biologic sequence or "program of action";
puberty, defloration, pregnancy, delivery. Another pattern Burkert explains in a
similar way is found in myths about the driving out of the scapegoat.
This pattern, Burkert argues, stems from a real situation that must often have
occurred in early human or primate history; a group of men, or a group of apes,
when pursued by carnivores, were able to save themselves through the sacrifice
of one member of the group. The persistence of these patterns through time is
explained, according to Burkert, by the fact that they are grounded in basic
human needs--above all, the need to survive.